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Tag: team

“Improv actors should behave like ants in a colony. Every player is an agent of the group mind.” — Bart Van Loon, 3rd May 2015, Würzburg (DE)

How can an ant colony be so effectively managed? How do most distributed systems in computer science work? The key is that every part is doing its best, without having all the information or taking all responsibility. There’s no question even on who is in charge. Nobody is ever. Yet everybody is all the time.

“See improv like a game of tennis, not golf.” — Patti Stiles, 18th October 2013, Würzburg (DE)

In both tennis and golf players each get a turn to hit the ball. In golf you’re doing your own thing in your own world and only try to do better than your opponent. In tennis however, everything you do is in direct response to what your opponent just did. You cannot play tennis without paying very close attention to your opponent all the time.

Perhaps a more accurate comparison would be ‘a friendly game of tennis’, just to leave out the competitive element altogether.